As part of a series of announcements at the company's annual SugarCon conference here, the open source CRM provider said it acquired iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises as a way to offer native Notes support, Notes email and calendar plugins and a connector to the IBM Domino product line.

Availability of this iExtensions functionality will be available in the Spring 2011 release of Sugar 6, the company said.

SugarCRM and IBM also announced availability of Sugar for LotusLive, which allows Sugar 6 users to schedule and host web meetings from within their CRM platform. The partnership also revealed new connectors for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Suite and IBM Websphere Cast Iron for SugarCRM integration platform.

SugarCRM also announced new support for Oracle, Amazon, Cisco, Citrix and leading mobile platforms.

For instance, Sugar 6 now offers support for the Oracle 11g database as well as Amazon's cloud infrastructure. To achieve the latter, SugarCRM partnered with BitNami to enable quick provisioning of Sugar 6 instances on the Amazon Web Services Platform, the company said.

"The latest edition of Sugar 6 will also offer integrations with popular web meeting tools including Cisco WebEx Meeting Center and Citrix-GoToMeeting," SugarCRM announced. "Additionally, Sugar 6 users will be able to upload, manage and share Google Docs right inside the Sugar 6 user interface. The open and flexible Sugar 6 platform offers users choice in how they wish to build their own social business processes."

The enhanced edition of Sugar 6 this spring will also offer support for Facebook and Twitter though the platform's Activity Streams capabilities.

Meanwhile, SugarCRM announced native support for the iPad and support for Android and Blackberry devices modeled after its Sugar Mobile for iPhone. On the mobile front, SugarCRM also announced offline synchronization capabilities and a new HTML5-based charting engine.

That's not all.

The Sugar 6 spring release will also offer support for simpler customization and will offer support for 8 new languages: Czech, Estonian, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish and Turkish.

Paula Rooney has covered the software and technology industry for more than 20 years, starting with semiconductor design and mini-computer systems at EDN News and later focused on PC software companies including Microsoft, Lotus, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell and other open source and commercial software companies for CRN and PCWeek. She receiv...
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